Question

I have two separate text files, one with 4 letter words and one with 4 digit numbers, all on individual lines. The words in the on file correspond to the numbers on the same line in the other file. For example:

CATS
RATS
HATS

matches up with

2287
7287
4287

What I would like is to append the numbers to the end of their matching word, so it looks like this:

CATS2287
RATS7287
HATS4287

so far what I have is this:

for i in $(cat numbers); do  
  sed 's/$/'$i'/' words;
done

but the problem is a) that doesn’t print/echo out to a new file and b) it loops through each word every time the first loop comes to a new number so in the end, all the words are paired up with the last number in the number file. Thanks in advance for the help.

Answer 1

paste -d "" /path/to/letters /path/to/numbers

Proof of Concept

$ paste -d "" CATS NUMS
CATS2287
RATS7287
HATS4287